Sunday, March 24, 2013

During
a two-day inaugural Global Summit on Merit Review held in Washington last May —
which was organised by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) at the request of the White House
Office of Science & Technology (OSTP) — a new
organisation called the Global Research Council (GRC) came into being.

Explaining the
rationale
for the new organisation, NSF Director Subra Suresh said, “This
global summit is the first step toward a more unified approach to the
scientific process. Science can rise above economic and cultural differences to
help develop trust and clear the path for agreements in other areas. Global
scientific collaboration expands the pool of knowledge that belongs to everyone
and serves as a tool to improve health, security and opportunity throughout the
world. Good science anywhere is good for science everywhere.”

The
first initiative of the GRC was to publish a Merit Review
Statement.
Released at the end of the Washington summit, this outlines a set of principles
for assessing funding applications, including the need to provide expert
assessment, transparency, impartiality, appropriateness, and confidentiality, as
well as integrity and ethical consideration.

But
for Open Access (OA) advocates, a
more interesting outcome of
the Washington summit was the news that the GRC
had decided to take up the issue of OA. As a result, at a second summit — to be held
in Berlin at the end of May with representatives from around 70 research
agencies — GRC will release consensus statements on both merit review and OA.

But
what exactly is GRC, how will it be funded, what is its remit, and what
precisely are its aspirations so far as Open Access is concerned?

To
find out more I conducted an interview with Johannes
Fournier,
who works for the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Fournier
is Program Director for the Scientific Library Services and Information Systems
group, the unit within DFG’s head office which looks after information
infrastructure and Open Access. As host of the upcoming GRC annual meeting, the
DFG has taken the lead on the issue of OA, and Fournier took part in all the
regional conferences that have been held in preparation for the May event.

Fournier
is also assisting the GRC’s International Steering Committee in developing an
action plan on Open Access.

####

If you wish to read the interview with Johannes Fournier, please click on the link below.

I
am publishing the interview under the CC BY-NC-ND licence. As such, you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you
credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do
not use it for any commercial purpose.

But
what may turn out to be the most divisive aspect of the new policy are its
licensing requirements, notably its insistence that when RCUK-funded
researchers embrace Gold OA, and pay an article-processing charge (APC), the publisher must make the
paper available under a CC-BY licence.

Adding
to the discomfort of those who are unhappy with this funding condition, on the
same day (April 1st) the UK’s Wellcome Trust— which was highly influential in the
development of the RCUK policy — will introduce a similar rule.

The
divisiveness of this new licensing approach is, perhaps, no better demonstrated
than the decision by the executive director of Rockefeller University Press (RUP) Mike Rossner
to pen an editorial
called “New mandates? No problem for The Rockefeller University Press”.

In
the editorial, Rossner questions the need for RCUK and Wellcome to insist on
CC-BY, and challenges their justification that it is necessary to do so in order to permit
reuse of the research they have funded, particularly through text and data
mining of papers.

OA-friendly

It
is important to note that over the years RUP has gained for itself an enviable
reputation as one of the most (if not the most) OA-friendly of all the traditional publishers.

RUP
insists on no more than a six-month embargo before the papers it publishes can
be made freely available — and in fact it releases them all itself at that
point. Moreover, unlike other subscription publishers, RUP licences all its
content under the more liberal CC-BY-NC-SA licence.

In
addition, Rossner has on a number of occasions publicly criticised other
publishers when they have sought to derail OA — e.g. here and here.

Indeed,
so OA-friendly did Rossner appear to be to OA advocates that in 2009 the OA advocacy group SPARC honoured him as
a SPARC
Innovator.
As SPARC put it at the time, “Mike Rossner is an anomaly, of sorts, in the
scientific publishing world. He is a force from within the establishment
pushing for policies to make information more widely accessible and verifiable.”

Since
then, Rossner has continued to prove OA-friendly. Last year he publicly
supported the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) — which,
amongst other things, would have reduced the embargo period specified in the Public Access Policy of the US
National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 12
months to 6 months, and required all the major agencies of the federal
government to introduce the new strengthened policy too.

Likewise,
Rossner publicly disavowed the
publisher-sponsored Research Works Act (RWA), a US bill
that would have had the opposite effect to FRPAA, reversing the NIH Public
Access policy and preventing other federal agencies from imposing similar
requirements on researchers.

And
last year Rossner — with SPARC’s Heather Joseph, plus
Michael Carroll,
and John Willbanks — co-founded
Access2Research, and
launched the petition that led to the recent executive
directive ordering all US Federal Agencies with research and development
budgets over $100M to develop public access policies within twelve months (referred
to by Rossner below as the White House directive).